"Chicago" ship, that brought Karnig Kevorkian (19) on January 18, 1912 from LeHavre (France) to Chicago.
Ship was built for French Line, French flag, in 1908. For 1,608 passengers. Le Havre-New York and later Le Havre-Caribbean service. Renamed Guadeloupe in 1928. Scrapped in France in 1936.
Source: Ellis Island Records
> > Following a Historic Stay at Hotel Van Grand (previously Hotel Vartan) - > > > > Victor Bedoian at center > > > > > > Harry Kehiakachoian and Aram Kevorkian at the entrance to Chunkoush
2
The 10th Century Church of the Holy Apostles in Kars.
The Monastery of Tadem near Kharpert.
Armenian magazine Ararat
(A Quarterly, Volume XXII, No. 4) where
in the Autumn 1981 was published "Four Hundred Chunkoush-tsis" by Aram J. Kevorkian
Armen Aroyan, tour organizer
Other articles about Pilgrimage to Western Armenia
"A Problem from Hell : America and the Age of Genocide"
by Samantha Power
By Aram J. Kevorkian,
Paris, France
On Saturday, September 21st 2002, a bright sunny day, I finally made it to the town in Turkey where my father, Karnig Kevorkian, was born, Chunkoush (currently spelled "Cüngüs" by the Turks), a place he left in 1911, at the age of 16, to escape to the United States and thus avoid the fate that befell his family and the 10,000 other Armenians there who were savagely massacred by the Turkish Army in April 1915. This massacre was part of the systematic genocide organized by the "Young Turk" government, led by the triumvirate of "pashas": Enver, Talaat, and Djemal, who led the Ottoman Empire during World War I (joining the losing side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and used the cover of war to get rid of the two-million Armenians living in Anatolia (the name given to the Asian part of Turkey).
Get the picture: My father arrives at Ellis Island in January 1912, goes to Chicago where a cousin has preceded him, and three years later, in April 1915, when he is only 19, his whole family is slaughtered, as well as all his neighbors in Chunkoush. To avenge their deaths, Karnig and a number of other Armenian youth orphaned by the savage genocide join the "Armenian Volunteer Movement," and sail to Russia, to fight the Turks. They head south to the Caucasian front, getting as far as Georgia, when the war ends. The Ottomans lost the war but for the Armenian soldiers there is no home to return to; outside of Constantinople (now Istanbul) and Smyrna (Izmir), there are no Armenians left in Turkey. Heading back to the USA, his ship docks in Philadelphia and he decides to get off with some comrades he has met. In September 1919, when he is only 24, a group of Armenians persuade him to take over a project to start an Armenian weekly newspaper. The paper is called Groong, name of the migratory bird that a haunting Armenian song considers a bearer of news. (This song provides the major musical theme of Atom Egoyan's new film on the genocide, Ararat).
It is not well known that the government which succeeded the "Young Turks" after the Ottoman defeat actually brought to trial before court-martial many of the leaders and officers responsible for the genocide of the Armenians (see V. Dadrian: The History of the Armenian Genocide). Along with six other leaders of the "Young Turk" government, Talaat Bey, the bloodthirsty Interior Minister, had fled to Germany, which refused to extradite them, but they were tried in absentia and sentenced to death. In March 1921, a 24-year-old Armenian, Soghomon Tehlirian, whose family was destroyed under orders of Talaat, tracked him to the Berlin hotel where he was living in luxury, put a decisive bullet into his head in the street outside the hotel, and then surrendered to the German police. The trial of Tehlirian became a cause célèbre throughout Europe, and all Diaspora Armenians rallied to his defense. A young woman, Hripcimée Hovaguimian, was then living in Marseilles, the Mediterranean port to which her family had fled from Smyrna, after a Turkish friend warned her father of the genocide in preparation. Having a college education, and a flair for writing, Hripcimée sent articles to my father's newspaper, describing the mobilization of the Armenian community in Marseilles in support of the man who avenged the crimes of Talaat. Tehlirian was acquitted, to the joy of Armenians everywhere, and he ended up in California, where he lived to a ripe old age. Hripcimée continued writing articles for the Groong and in time, the correspondence between her and Karnig became more than professional. In August, 1926, Karnig traveled to Marseilles and obtained Antreas Hovaguimian's permission to marry his daughter that very month. In due time, a son was born and was given the names of his two grandfathers, Avedis and Antreas (the latter name being converted to Andrew, when my brother was enrolled in elementary school). When my time came to see the world, I was given the names of my father's two younger brothers who perished in 1915, Aram and Hagop (Hagop - the equivalent of Jacob - being converted to Jack, when my turn came to go to school). It was only many years later that I learned from my brother that our father had a third sibling, a sister - Maryam - who also was slaughtered by the Turks.
Dad never talked about his brothers and sister, and I never asked him questions about them or, indeed, about his parents. It was obvious that the subject was too painful to be discussed, both for him and for me. In Philadelphia, there was only a handful of Armenians from Chunkoush, all men who, like my father, had managed to escape from Turkey before they became of military age, and risked being drafted into the Turkish Army and never heard from again. My father's closest friends were Harry Krikorian, Sarkis Bogosian, Nishan Androian and Mardiros Klijian, all of whom had married and founded families. They never talked about their family who had perished at Chunkoush.
When I became of an age to attend Armenian functions, I soon learned that Chunkoush was not well known among Armenians in America. In my day, when one met another Armenian, it was customary to identify oneself by indicating where one's parents were born. Typically, when I would say that my mother was from Izmir and my father from Chunkoush, the response was "where's that?" Even today, a lot of Armenians have never heard of Chunkoush, and I was to find that many Turks had no idea where Cüngüs is located. The reason for this ignorance is that Chunkoush was an essentially Armenian town, with a small Turkish presence, and since virtually all the Armenians were killed, there were very few people alive who had any memory of it. The blackout of Chunkoush is so great that one chronology of the Armenian genocide on the web does not even mention the town.
My father continued to publish his newspaper for 43 years, never missing an issue. It was a family affair. All four Kevorkians participated, my father doing the bulk of the work: writing articles, setting type on the Linotype, composing pages on the stone. My mother wrote articles and handled the bank account. When Andrew and I became of an age to help, we did our share, working the press, inserting pages, operating the folding machine and the hand-operated addressing machine, packing papers to be taken to the main post office for second-class mail. More often than not we would finish at five in the morning and drive with our Dad to the 30th Street post office so that the paper could be delivered the same day. My participation continued until I was graduated from Penn, after which I left Philadelphia to attend law school. In September, 1962, nine months after my mother died, my father put an end to the Groong, finishing the subscription year so that no one would be cheated. By this time I was practicing law in Paris, and was worried about how my father would survive without his beloved newspaper. Then I learned from my brother that Dad was preparing a book about Chunkoush, with the support and encouragement of a number of Chunkoush-tsis (the plural suffix indicates persons originating there) in the United States. At first I assumed that this would be a book of reminiscences from men who were only boys when they left their hometown. But then I learned that my Dad was doing serious research in faraway places. He went to London to the British Museum (which then housed the British Library), to Paris for the Nubarian Library, to Venice where on the Island of San Lazarro the Armenian Catholic monks of the Mekhitarist Order (where Lord Byron learned Armenian) have a treasure of archives, to Vienna where other Mekhitarists are established, to the Saint James convent in Jerusalem, and even to Istanbul, where the Armenian Patriarch showed him some rare documents touching on Chunkoush. When my father told the Patriarch that he would like to visit Chunkoush, he was firmly advised to stay away from the place, as not being safe for an Armenian to visit. Karnig heeded his advice, I'm glad to say, because the visit would surely have been a shocker to a man of 72.
My father's book, titled Chunkoushabadoum in Armenian, was printed at the Saint James Press of Jerusalem in 1970 and was distributed to the principal libraries in the USA and abroad. William Saroyan wrote a stirring Introduction to it in English saying, among other things: "It is heroic and refreshing, majestic and mysterious and beautiful that Karnig Kevorkian has done this great work." The English version of the title is The Story of Chunkoush and the subtitle is "Critical History of the Armenians in Chunkoush." The book was described as Volume I, dealing with "Geography, History, Culture, Philology, Ethnography." My father was gathering material for a second volume, which would have been more personal, I believe, but he died in January 1972, before he could bring it to fruition. When I actually saw the book in print, I was amazed at how much ground he covered. There were chapters on local folk sayings, on songs, on children's games, even on curses and swear words, on clothing, on food, indeed on every aspect of the lives of Armenians in Chunkoush. Then I understood that my father had worked a sort of miracle: he had resurrected an Armenian town that had ceased to be one week in 1915, when the Turkish Army came and first rounded up all the able-bodied men, led them away to be slaughtered, then returned for the women, children and aged, who met a like fate.
Let me confess that while I had learned to read Armenian by going to Armenian school in Philadelphia, after regular school hours, I was not able to bring myself to read my father's book through and through. It was as though I could escape the pain by leaving Chunkoush in a haze, like a bad dream from which one can flee by awakening to reality. If Chunkoush got too vivid, it would be as though Aram, Hagop and Maryam were peering at me through a window. I did not want to see them. If they were not real for me, then their slaughter would not be real.
The reader will thus understand why I had never been eager to visit Turkey, and why I let my proverbial "three score years and ten" elapse before I allowed myself to be persuaded to do so. I must thank for that Armen Aroyan, the tour organizer - an Armenian whose family originated in Aintab (Gazi-Antep today) but who was born in Egypt and has lived for forty years in Southern California (aroyan@earthlink.net, 626-359-9510). Armen was soothing, both via email and phone, and when I joined up with him at the Van airport, I found him to be an unflappable, calm person, whose matter-of-fact, low-key approach played a decisive role in allowing each of the 16 Armenian-Americans on our tour to discover his/her roots with a minimum of stress and drama.
I passed my first night in Anatolia in Van, once a distinctly Armenian town, an ancient Armenian capital, and now 95-percent Kurdish, with no Armenians except for Victor Bedoian, born in the USA, but who decided to live in Van and establish a hotel there.(His trials and tribulations have been publicized in the Turkish and Armenian press over the past two years.) The next morning we visited the vestiges of the beautiful Holy Cross Armenian church located on Aghtamar island in Lake Van. My second night was in Diyarbakir (called Dikranagerd by the Armenians) where, again, there are no Armenians left, save a 70-plus tottering man who lives opposite the ruins of the Armenian church there. Heading finally for Chunkoush, I could feel my tension mounting as the minibus climbed the winding roads against a background of barren hills, reminiscent of an Arizona desert landscape. Fortunately, I was comforted by the fact that I was not the lone Chunkoush-tsi in our group, for Harry Kehiakachoian, of Canoga Park, CA. was with us. Like Karnig Kevorkian, his father had gotten out of Chunkoush in time to avoid the fate of his family. Our leader, Armen, unsettled me a bit by saying that it would be necessary to get approval to visit Chunkoush from the Kaymakam (provincial governor). What if he refused? My trip would have been in vain. We stopped at the first sign announcing the arrival within the Cüngüs town limits and the group took pictures of Harry and me, both individually and together. At least we could now say we had been to Chunkoush. When the bus stopped in front of the government building, Jemal, our superb Kurdish driver and factotum, went in to get permission, and in a few minutes he returned, signaling with his hand that all was OK.
The Armenians in Chunkoush lived in the highest part of town, where they felt the most secure against attacks. It is believed that the Armenians had settled there many centuries ago, coming from the ancient cities of Ani and Van, where once flourished Armenian kingdoms that were sacked by the invading Seljuk Turks in the 11th century. Indeed, on the map provided by Armen, I could see that Chunkoush was a dead end in the mountains. There was no road leading out of it except the one we had taken to get in. When we reached what had been the Armenian sector of Chunkoush, we saw that all that was left was rubble where there once had been homes, as well as ruins of the Armenian Apostolic (Surp Garabed) and Armenian Catholic churches. No trace remains of the small Protestant church. The Turkish Army had pillaged, then destroyed the Armenians' homes when they had finished destroying the Armenians. Surely, the nomad Kurds whom the authorities had prodded to join in the destruction looked for the hidden gold that the Armenians were supposed to have buried under their homes. As part of his video record of the trip, Armen began filming Harry Kachoian, who had prepared a statement about his family and the massacre of the Armenians. Then it was my turn to be filmed for the video record. I made no reference to the slaughter but quoted from Yeats' "Lapis Lazuli": "All things fall and are built again…" making the point that my father had eschewed hatred in favor of building a new family. It was only then that Armen Aroyan made an amazing revelation. Two years before, when they had visited Chunkoush, the provincial governor had asked him whether he knew Aram Kevorkian! At first, I thought that Armen was pulling my leg with this tale, but he insisted that it was true. Armen had replied that he did not know me but that he had heard of me. Then the governor stated that Aram Kevorkian had written about Chunkoush. I was flabbergasted. The only times I had written about Chunkoush were in my Newsletters, as well as in an article that had been published many years ago in Ararat magazine, called "Four Hundred Chunkoush-tsis," which dealt with my father's book. Were the Turkish authorities so paranoid that they kept track of every Armenian's writing about the home country, to the point of notifying a local official? I asked Armen why he had not informed me earlier of this conversation. He replied that he had not wanted to upset me. He was right. Indeed, had I known that my name was on the desk of the Turkish governor in Chunkoush I would never have made the trip!
Then we drove to another, once remote, part of town where Armenian monks had established the monastery of Sirahayats Surp Asdvadzadzin As we were to find everywhere, all that was left of the monastery were the ruined remnants of the chapel, too solidly built to be utterly destroyed, whereas the cloister - the living quarters - had long since disappeared. I was the first to enter the chapel, followed by young Kurdish boys, and a young man in casual dress. Trying to appear nonchalant, I asked him if he had been born in Chunkoush. He said "No," he was working there temporarily. It was only later that persons in our group told me that this young man had arrived at the monastery in a police car! He was a plain-clothes-man, part of the surveillance team! It was quite frightening to be discovering Chunkoush under the watchful eyes of the Turkish police. As the boys were still there, I decided to appear as the typical American tourist, and started singing "Oh Susanna" and the boys clapped in rhythm, while members of our group filmed us. I was eager to get out of town, lest they discover that the Aram Kevorkian known to the governor was in the visiting group.
The last part of the visit was the most gruesome, for I had just learned from Armen that the Armenians had not been killed in Chunkoush itself, where there would have been too many witnesses, but rather had been forced to walk several kilometers down the road to an area known as the Doudan, where there are bottomless pits that end in a stream that leads to the nearby Euphrates. There the Armenians had been forced to undress, their hands had been tied, and their throats slit or their heads shattered with axes, and their bodies thrown into the pits. As we were leaving Chunkoush, Armen told us that this was the most sensitive part of the trip for we were likely to be followed. He told us to remain in the bus and take pictures from within. Despite this, a few of us got out and ventured a few steps where we could see the openings of the pits below. We quickly took a few pictures and boarded the bus, having stopped barely three minutes at the very spot where some 10,000 Armenians of Chunkoush met their horrible end, leaving no trace whatever of their mortal life. Chunkoush, too, had died on that day. Is it any wonder that Karnig Kevorkian, at 67, decided to resuscitate it? (For an amazing confirmation of the murder of Chunkoush's Armenians, on a Kurdish web site, see "Cungus and the Gullu Agha")
As we headed down to the valley of Harput, my mind was groping to deal with what I had just experienced. The first thought was how preposterous and puzzling it was for the Turkish government to keep denying the reality of the Armenian Genocide, or to excuse the massacres on the ground that the Armenians were in a war zone and had to be removed. Chunkoush was not in a war zone. It was in such an out-of-the-way place that any Russian Army commander would have been insane to want to conquer it. The Armenians had chosen this mountain area for precisely that reason. What's more, if you feel you have to remove a population from a place, you do not have to kill them. (Cf. Japanese-Americans during World War II.) In other areas, where American and other consuls or missionaries were present, the Turks used the resettlement ploy and forced hundreds of thousands of women and children to march through the Syrian dessert, depriving them of food and water until they fell dead, or were killed by marauding Kurds just to get their shoes and clothing. Why did Ataturk, who was not responsible for the genocide, continue the denial process even after his "revolution" which toppled the Sultan in 1923 and made Turkey a republic, if not a democracy? Was the crime too shameful for even a successor government to admit? Or did he fear that survivors, or heirs of the murdered Armenians, would ask for reparations? Turkish governments, even today, continue the denial and spend millions of dollars in public-relations efforts. Turkish guide books and web sites do not even mention the ancient Armenian presence in the country that became Turkish by conquest. At best, they identify churches as "Christian" to avoid using the word "Armenian." (This is a good occasion to point out that the Greeks in Turkey were also victims of massacres and expulsions during World War I and its aftermath. As to Smyrna, the Turks got rid of the remaining Greeks and Armenians in 1922 - see Marjorie Housepian, The Smyrna Affair. A book in French by Raymond H. Kevorkian and Paul B. Paboudjian, called The Armenians in the Ottoman Empire on the Eve of the Genocide [ARHIS 1992], describes – with photographs – hundreds of Armenian communities that disappeared in 1915. The novel by the Austrian Jew, Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, provides a historic account of the genocide, and describes the heroic resistance of some Armenian villagers who refused deportation.)
A few months ago, I had read Samantha Power's powerful book called A Problem from Hell, whose basic theme is that the United States and other western powers have regularly looked the other way when a genocide is taking place but, once it is over, deploring and gnashing of teeth make up for the inaction that might have saved lives of innocent people. Naturally, her book starts with the 1915 genocide of the Armenians, and describes the efforts of the US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, to get the State Department to do something about the horrible events he learned about from American consuls in Anatolia. The US was not at war with Turkey and the State Department line was that this was purely an internal Turkish matter. Morgenthau met often with Talaat Pasha and tried to get him to stop the slaughter of the Armenians, but Talaat told him to mind his own business. In his Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, Morgenthau recounts that Talaat had the gall to ask him to get from American insurance companies, such as New York Life, a list of life-insurance policies they had sold to Armenians in Turkey, stating that as the insured were now dead, and their heirs as well, the insurance proceeds should go to the Turkish government! Morgenthau told Talaat where to go. However, New York Life still has not paid off on thousands of such policies, contending that proof of death has not been furnished! Do you suppose that the Turkish soldiers who dumped the Kevorkian family into the Doudan were issuing death certificates labeled "to whom it may concern"? Thanks to a courageous Armenian lawyer in Los Angeles, Vartkes Yeghiayan, a class action is pending against the New York Life Insurance Company to obtain payment under these insurance policies. It will soon be 90 years that the insured were murdered!
Another chapter in Samantha Power's book relates the saga of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who, having learned of the extermination of the Armenians in Turkey, became obsessed with the very fact that no law, or even concept, existed that would make it a crime for a sovereign nation to destroy a minority population within its borders. At that time, the word "genocide" did not exist. Lemkin, who became a lawyer, devoted most of his life to seeking to implant the concept into international law and morality, which necessitated finding a word for it. At first, he hit upon "barbarity" and it was only in 1944 that he coined the word "genocide." Ironically, his own family in Poland was among the victims of Hitler's imitation of the Ottomans' crime. (Indeed, in a 1939 speech, Hitler stated "Who remembers the extermination of the Armenians.") Lemkin, with very little support or encouragement from the US government, worked indefatigably to get genocide recognized as an international crime. After the creation of the United Nations in 1945, he agitated and lobbied in favor of a treaty that would define and proscribe genocide. Finally, he had the satisfaction to witness the signing of such a treaty in Geneva under the auspices of the UN in December 1948. Astoundingly, the United States Senate waited almost 40 years before ratifying the Genocide Convention! Today, the US State Department still shies away from calling what happened to the Armenians a "genocide"! During World War II, President Roosevelt and the top military command knew of the "final solution" that the German government was perpetrating on the Jews, but did nothing to stop it, other than continuing with the war. During Clinton's presidency a genocide of the Tutsis was carried out in Rwanda, but the US (under President Clinton) and other nations merely looked the other way.
Diaspora Armenians yearn for closure of the 1915 genocide of their compatriots but this can never come until a Turkish government admits that it occurred. Post-war Germany officially recognized the Jewish Holocaust and paid reparations to its victims and to Israel. Personally, I do not seek reparations, but I think that it would be fitting that the Turkish Republic make compensation payments to its neighbor, the struggling Republic of Armenia, which obtained independence in 1991, when the USSR broke up. It is hard for Armenians not to think of themselves as losers when they reflect that their compatriots in Anatolia were wiped out, while those who had been under Czarist Russia's domination in the Caucasus had to endure 70 years of communism, which did its worst to erase liberty and honesty from their souls. Adding salt to our wounds is the attitude of the Israeli government - military ally of Turkey - and the American Jewish Lobby, which support Turkish efforts to prevent official American recognition of the Armenian Genocide. Some Jews want to assert the "uniqueness" of their genocide, but every genocide is unique by hypothesis, since every race, every ethnic group is unique. Last year, shameless Simon Peres, who is so hungry for the limelight that he is participating in the Sharon government, made the following statement in Ankara: "It is a tragedy what the Armenians went through but not a genocide." He was wrong on both counts: it was a genocide but not a tragedy, anymore than the Shoah was a tragedy, if you adhere to the classic concept that tragedy requires a protagonist, like Antigone or King Lear, who contributes to his own downfall through hubris or other character flaw. The Armenians in Turkey and the Jews in Europe were innocent in that regard, unless you want to say that adhering to one's identity is a character flaw. In other words, mass killing may be a catastrophe, but not necessarily a tragedy in the classic sense.
My father, who never ceased to mull over the fate of the Armenians, startled me in the last year of his life by saying suddenly, "I wonder if we did the right thing to become Christians in the fourth century." Would his parents, his siblings have been spared if the Armenians had waited a few centuries and become Muslims, as the Persians did, and the invading Turks from Central Asia? In 1915, many Armenian children were taken into Turkish families and raised as Muslims. Yet the Kurds, who have been Muslim for centuries, and now occupy areas that were once Armenian, have had a hard time maintaining their identity and language in Turkey and other Muslim countries. And Iraq and Iran, both Muslim nations, fought a bloody war recently.
I feel sorry for the Turkish people, who for three generations have been denied the right to know the TRUTH of the worst chapter in their nation's history. Perhaps we need another Raphael Lemkin, to coin a word for the massive killing of truth: vericide?